"Sandy Bridge" will use a ring bus to allow the on-chip cores and media units (including the on-die GPU) to access the cache. (Source: Anandtech)

Chipmaker doesn't reveal launch date for the Westmere-EX

Intel
likely today set those looking to deploy a high-performance single
socket server solution salivating with its unveiling of the
Westmere-EX.
Following the
Gulftown
lineup --
which trickled out starting in March 2010 -- the
Westmere-EX is
Intel's latest 32 nm Westmere
chip.

Westmere is very similar to the Nehalem
45 nm architecture, meaning it's a "tick" design -- not a
major redesign. That's not to say there isn't enough to be
excited about here, though. Intel is making good use of its
extra die space saved by the shrink and the Westmere-EX
packs an incredible 10 cores in a single socket package. That
adds up to a total of 20 threads.

For the
supercomputing-minded, the new chip bumps the amount of usable memory
from 1TB (64 DIMM slots) to 2TB. There's no official word on
the name of the processor -- past Gulftown
server designs were in the Xeon 3600- and 5600-series. Also not
revealed are clock speeds and launch date.

Perhaps more
exciting was new details Intel revealed about its upcoming "tock"
(architecture redesign), code-named
Sandy
Bridge.
The upcoming 32 nm architecture will feature a ring design for its
last-level cache access. Cache will be accessible by an on-chip
3D Graphics Processing Unit, the four (or potentially more)
cores, and the Media Processing unit. The ring bus is designed
to deliver high-bandwidth to the various connected cores in the
chip.

The processor will feature the return of Turbo Boost
mode, which allows the easy overclocking of Intel's
processors.

Sandy
Bridge PC
processors will keep the CORE-i3, i5, and i7 designations and will be
rebranded the "new CORE-i3..." That approach is
likely to create confusion among customers about exactly what they're
buying, given that the average user likely wouldn't be able to pick a
Nehalem
i7 from a Westmere i7 or Sandy
Bridge
i7.

On a more positive note,
though, AnandTech is reporting that
the Media Processing Unit will include video transcode hardware.
In a demo that hardware crunched ~1 minute long 30Mbps 1080p HD video
clip to an iPhone compatible format in under 10 seconds. The
transcode hardly can be viewed as Intel's attempt to fend of NVIDIA's
GPU computing from entering the consumer market.

GPU computing
is a hot new field of computing -- it centers around the notion that
dedicated video hardware can outperform CPUs at a number tasks,
including chemical simulations, video encoding, physics simulations,
and more.

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